Jean Cocteau: timeless poet

Jean Cocteau is multiple: a poet before everything else, but also a novelist, play-writer, critic, screen-writer, dialogist, film director, actor, draughtsman, painter, he creates costumes and sets for different shows, imagines ballets, and is mentioned in a music dictionary. He is proof of a prodigious gift of transformation and of the ability to enter into a phase with an era, an aesthetic quality or another creator. The ambition of complete art, ranked the first artistic ambition by the wangerian opera at the end of the 19 th Century and then taken over by the Russian Ballets at the beginning of the 20 th century is embodied in Cocteau.

He is all sorts of art at the same time.
"A work of art has to satisfy all Muses. That's what I call: Evident proof".

He was born on the 5th of July 1889 and passed away on the 11th of October 1963.
"I have always preferred Mythology to History because History is made up of truths that later become lies and Mythology is made up of lies that later become truths". JC

Most of his last graphic poetry works reflect his passion for mythology, as can be seen on the Côte d'Azur: frescos in Villefranche (St. Pierre chapel), in St. Jean Cap Ferrat (Santo Sospir villa), in Cap d'Ail (amphitheatre at the Centre Méditerranéen), and in Menton (marriage hall). The same for his major theatre works like Antigone, La Machine infernale and Orpheus, as well as his films: The Beauty and the Beast, Orpheus.

The power of antic and medieval myths, their eloquence, their ability to talk to us about important issues of human existence in a simple and capturing manner fascinate Cocteau. He transformed this obsession into mythographic creativity: he skilfully put together antic wisdom with our modern European sensibility. This is how he expressed limits of Man's cognitive faculties, the mysterious links between the visible world and the invisible one, with the help of Sphinx's enigmatic character for example, or that of the mirror through which Orpheus comes and goes.